Did the Russian mafia help Trump along his way to the Oval Office?

House of Trump, House of Putin by Craig Unger reviewed.

Before he died last year, the New York muckraking reporter Wayne Barrett told me he had discovered ‘25 to 30’ connections between Donald Trump and the mob. He was talking about Italian-American organised crime but today another New York journalist, Craig Unger, says he has found ‘59’ links to the Russian mafia. He lists them all in his new book House of Trump, House of Putin, which is damning in its accumulation of detail, terrifying in its depiction of the pure evil of those Trump chose to do business with, and enraging in that — if Unger is right — Trump acted with impunity for decades to get filthy rich laundering the mob’s blood money. This is the man who now sits in the Oval Office, Unger says. In fact, he argues, they put him there.

House of Trump, House of Putin starts with Trump’s early days in business, when his lawyer was Roy Cohn, who was also consigliere to two of the five New York Italian crime families and ‘the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54’. There were mafia figures like ‘Sonny’ Franzese, a hitman who was recorded helpfully explaining how to get rid of the bodies: ‘Dismember victim in kiddie pool. Cook body parts in microwave. Stuff parts in garbage disposal. Be patient.’ When one of these Italian gangsters met Trump to buy an apartment ‘he opened his briefcase and $200,000 in cash spilled out on Trump’s table’.

To the Russians, this was small time. Unger retells a story of Barrett’s that when a Red mafiya boss, David Bogatin, came to Trump Tower, he met Trump himself and immediately bought five apartments for $6 million in cash (about $14.5 million today). Trump didn’t seem to wonder where this money might have come from. He was one of the first developers to discover that you could sell condos to shell companies that concealed the owners’ identities, Unger says. This allowed Russian criminals ‘to launder vast amounts of money’. Trump’s willingness to sell ‘no questions asked’ was so important, Unger believes, that he gave the Russian mafia a foothold in the United States.

The Trump Organization’s reply to this is that money laundering is ‘a problem for the whole real estate industry’. How are we supposed to know where anyone’s money comes from? Fuhgeddaboudit! It is a convenient alibi but not a persuasive one, given the large amount of such business done by the Trump Organization. Anders Åslund, a Swedish expert on Russian money laundering, is quoted in the book: ‘Early on, Trump came to the conclusion that it is better to do business with crooks than with honest people.’ An investigation by the news website BuzzFeed found that 1,300 condos in Trump buildings were bought by shell companies that paid cash, a fifth of his sales since the 1980s. Unger points to the Trump World Tower in Manhattan, where a third of apartments on the highest and most expensive floors were sold this way. And more than Trump’s customers, there are Unger’s other links between Trump and suspect Russians. As Oscar Wilde might have said: ‘To have one Russian mafia connection may be regarded as a misfortune; to have 59 looks like carelessness.’

More: https://spectator.us/2018/08/did-the-mafia-help-trump-along-his-way-to-the-oval-office/